Tag Archives: virtual reality

Live Concerts in Virtual Reality

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For the last 4 years, VR has been on a rapid increase and improvement roll. 4 years ago, to enjoy VR, you needed a whole room to fit the equipment. Today, we have VR goggles in our houses that can basically fit into one of our drawers.

Virtual Reality is mostly used in video games and videos, but last year in January, Google collaborated with legendary band Queen to create the first-ever virtual reality concert. It was created by mixing 2D and 3D animations in the video. The song, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was also retouched so it can suit the interactive part of VR. After the success they have achieved, a lot of festivals have had live streams that have been able to be viewed in VR, in real-time. One of those festivals was the EDM titan, Ultra Miami, that was among the first ones to have a live stream in VR. The VR version of the live stream was only running for an hour because it needed a lot of attention and care, which is hard when you have to keep track of more than 130,000 people in the venue and the regular live stream among other technicalities.

The only problem of this venture is making the VR affordable to the wide public so everybody can enjoy the concerts. Some experts are predicting that VR concerts will maybe become the biggest income source for the artists in the future.

Is this a sign that maybe in 5 or 10 years we will not even have to go to a concert? Maybe we will just have to put on our VR headsets and enjoy all the live acts that we wanted to see from the comfort of our home, without having to pay for the airplane tickets, hotels, and other travel expenses.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38795190

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/melodyvr-virtual-reality-music

Virtual Reality: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You (in actual reality)!

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In the past decade, it is no secret that with the convenience of online movie services like Netflix, the movie theater industry has taken quite a hit thanks to more and more people staying at home.  In today’s world of disruptive innovation, the only way for theater companies to combat this loss of profits is to offer new, exciting experiences to draw the crowds back inside.  Their next big idea?  Virtual reality arcades.

VR Demo

A recent Dreamscape Immersive demo in Sweden

According to a recent New York Times article, movie theater giant AMC Entertainment is teaming up with VR start-up Dreamscape Immersive to bring this idea to life.  This fascinating technology, which relies on a variety of camera, sensors, and head-mounted displays (HMDs) stationed in an open area, “allows up to six people to explore a virtual-reality environment at once, seeing fully rendered avatars of one another,” and “participants can handle objects and — as avatars — even pass them between one another” (Barnes).  AMC’s CEO Adam Aron is very excited about this endeavor and the experiences it can provide, stating that “their vision is to change what V.R. has been — away from just a heightened level of video game and toward cinematic storytelling — and we think it’s what consumers have been waiting for” (Barnes).  Personally, I agree and think this would be a really fun application of this growing field of technology and would love to give it a try.  This new business partnership is said to allow for around six new Dreamscape locations to open in the U.S. within the next year and a half, and ticket prices are intended to start at $15 (Barnes).

Was this a good move by AMC and would you personally want to visit one of these attractions?  Leave a comment below.

 

Barnes, Brooks. “Coming Soon to AMC Theaters: Virtual Reality Experiences.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Sept. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/business/media/amc-theaters-virtual-reality.html

Image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_iWj67XgAA2_7g.jpg